Spectral Decomposition Representation for Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Representation learning often plays a critical role in avoiding the curse of dimensionality in reinforcement learning. A representative class of algorithms exploits spectral decomposition of the stochastic transition dynamics to construct representations that enjoy strong theoretical properties in idealized settings. However, current spectral methods suffer from limited applicability because they are constructed for state-only aggregation and are derived from a policy-dependent transition kernel, without considering the issue of exploration. To address these issues, we propose an alternative spectral method, Spectral Decomposition Representation (SPEDER), that extracts a state-action abstraction from the dynamics without inducing spurious dependence on the data collection policy, while also balancing the exploration-versus-exploitation trade-off during learning. A theoretical analysis establishes the sample efficiency of the proposed algorithm in both the online and offline settings. In addition, an experimental investigation demonstrates superior performance over current state-of-the-art algorithms across several RL benchmarks.